Soccer is a simple game, the England striker Gary Lineker once remarked. “Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans win.” The quip was on the mark four years ago, when Germany beat Argentina to lift the World Cup in Brazil. If hard numbers have any predictive power, it will once again prove correct when the battle for the sport’s ultimate trophy reaches its climax in Russia this summer. The Breakingviews Soccernomics calculator ranks the 32 contenders according to four metrics, and uses these to predict which country will come out on top. In

Amazon has a surprisingly delicate touch for an $823 billion company. The U.S. e-commerce group made its first foray into UK soccer rights, but left local players Sky and BT with most of the games. That suggests Chief Executive Jeff Bezos cares as much about scoring tactical goals as tackling rivals head-on. Top clubs like Manchester United have been eagerly waiting for Amazon and other deep-pocketed tech groups to make a move on UK soccer rights. After a steep rise in the cost of rights at the last three-year auction in 2015, Sky and BT last year agreed to share